General Election 2015: The tactical voting guide: How to make your vote count even when you think it doesn’t
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Version 0 of 1. Voting is meant to be easy. You decide which party you like most, and mark an X against the name of that party’s candidate in your constituency. But what if you are indifferent between two or more parties? At the same time, you are clear who you do not want to win. Would it not make more sense to vote for the party that is best able locally to defeat the party you want to lose? Welcome to tactical voting, a necessary evil of the current first-past-the-post system, where voters vote against what they do not want rather than in favour of what they do. But to do this effectively, you need to know where such voting could make a difference. Are you undecided about who to vote for on 7 May? Are you confused about what the parties stand for and what they are offering? Take this interactive quiz to help you decide who to vote for... Click here to launch The obvious place to start is the result last time. Tactical switching is only likely to make a difference in a marginal seat, while what happened last time provides a guide as to which party is best placed to defeat the party you dislike. But you also need to take account of where the parties currently stand in the polls. If the polls are correct, there will be something like a three- or four-point swing nationally from Conservative to Labour since 2010. That implies the tightest races will mostly be in those seats where the Conservatives were between four and 10 points ahead of Labour in 2010. There are 33 such seats in England and Wales. Just how finely balanced they are is underlined by the fact that according to Lord Ashcroft’s most recent constituency poll in each, Labour is ahead in 16, the Conservatives in 16, while one is tied. If you do not want Labour or the Conservatives to “win” the election, these are places above all where making a tactical switch in favour of their principal opponent makes most sense. But what if you currently have a Liberal Democrat MP? Given that the party’s vote nationally is down by as much as 14 points since 2010, any Liberal Democrat seat with a majority of less than 20 points last time could be switched in either direction by tactical voting. In 27 of these seats in England and Wales, the Liberal Democrats’ principal opponents are the Conservatives. Lord Ashcroft puts the party ahead in 17, behind in 10. The most marginal, where Labour are the main challengers locally, are probably already lost, but of the five where the Liberal Democrats were at least five points ahead in 2010, the party is supposedly still ahead in two. But perhaps the biggest tactical battle for the party is in Nick Clegg’s supposedly safe Sheffield Hallam seat which according to Lord Ashcroft is under threat from what has hitherto been a third-placed Labour party locally. In Scotland, however, the surge in SNP support threatens to redraw the nation’s political map fundamentally. Consequently, the race could well only be tight locally in what up to now looked like the safest of Labour and Liberal Democrat seats – together with, as ever, the Tories’ sole Scottish citadel, Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale & Tweeddale. John Curtice is Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University |